1. Unit 4 The Handmaid’s Tale
AO2
Narrative Techniques
Imagery and symbols
language

2. Narrative Techniques Autobiographical narrative
Significance of storytelling as an act of resistance against oppression
Individual political statement
Historical Notes – ‘projects oppression’
Transcribed by male historians
Flashbacks (‘Night’)
Abrupt shifts between scenes (past to present)
Symbolic narrative (18th century slave narrative)
Postmodern (draws readers attention to the process of story telling – reasons why she needs to tell her story)

3. Language and Imagery
Offred’s language is split between the ‘muted’ and ‘constricted’ style used to record her daily life with the rules of Gilead and the ‘energy’ and rich vocabulary used to describe her memories and her fight for freedom
Her description of her room – isolation (‘frozen halo’ p.17 – description of the ceiling)
Irony and humour (p.106 and p.148 – merging humour and hysteria when describing relationship with commander)

4. Imagery
Flowers:
Imagery connects the seasonal cycle of plants with the menstrual cycle women experience
Eggs:
Like flowers, these represent womanhood and fertility. It is what the Handmaid is in society, her only role
Moon:
This can represent fertility, but mostly it represents time being lost and the hope being contained in that time
Animals:
Animal imagery is used to describe her role in society, but Atwood uses animals as she plays with language

5. Irony
A tool for Offred’s mental survival. She has an awareness of the gaps between appearance and reality – this adds a comic dimension to the novel (at the ceremony ‘there’s something hilarious about this’
Also, when playing scrabble it is all she can do not to ‘shriek with laughter, fall off my chair’
Her language is often a mixture of hysteria and irony – she compares her laughter to an epileptic fit, the images are of loss of control and damage to the point where she explodes : ‘Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth’ (p.156)

6. Offred’s ‘private narrative’
This is the secret to her emotional survival – it is focused on memory and her own body.
It is her discourse of the body that, chronicling her physical sensations and desires, which provides the lyrical dimension of this novel in her use of poetic imagery and imaginary landscapes. In writing about her body Offred shows how a feminine voice can find a way of speaking even when silenced – ‘whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently’ (p.161) Chapters 5 and 13 have examples of the above.

7. Image clusters Human body (hands/feet/faces/eyes/blood/wombs)
Nature (garden/flowers/seasons/light – moonlight)
Offred’s ‘feminine’ language works in opposition to Gilead’s polluted technological nightmare

8. Historical Notes
Supplement to the story – they ‘frame’ Offred’s narration
‘Flash forward’ to AD 2195 – Offred’s fate still a mystery after Gilead had become obsolete
Offred’s transcripts are edited by 2 Cambridge professors – unique structural device – why?
Offred’s story is a ‘reconstruction’
Piexoto wants to focus on Gileadan social theory – it is not a personal exploration of individuals. The reader knows nothing more of Offred’s fate – why?

9. Historical Notes (2)
Atwood emphasizes the academic notes, context, all the elements of research which establishes the tale as real, while simultaneously questioning its authenticity as scholarship tends to do.
The Professor’s name – Darcy- recalls Mr Darcy, Austen’s romantic hero and is fitting for a story in which romance is frustrated and longed for, and its basis located in male power and ownership.

10. Historical Notes (3)
The conference seems trivial in the light of Offred’s disappearance and our closeness as readers to her thoughts and fate.
But, it reassures us that her tale survived and that the dreadful controls of Gilead passed on, that human nature can survive such mind and body control and destruction.
The comparison with Iran betrays Atwood’s initial influences, seeing women in the Burka, all in black, defined by their marital status and denied freedom of education.
The tapes were discovered in a footlocker in Maine – part of Underground Femaleroad which proves that an escape system was real.
Offred’s tale is identified as a heroic monument from the Gilead period. Piexoto and his colleague have reconstructed a tape machine to play the tapes.
It is ironic that the tale is constructed by male scholars when it is about a woman and her constrained life under a totalitarian , religious patriarchally dominated tyranny .

11. Historical Notes (4)
They cannot trace Offred but place her as one of the first, recruited for reproductive purposes. They place her tale in the historical context of a disaster where biological warfare stocks were dumped into the sewage system and insecticides and other pollutants all combined to make the place toxic.
Here we get a context which is aligned with Atwood’s writing against pollution and her interest in sustainability.
Names are given and the Commander is placed historically as someone who spoke against enabling women to read – this all authenticates her story.
As readers we have come so close to Offred’s life that the sterile reconstruction by the academics is an intrusion.
We have a very sharp focus on Offred’s fate and in the truth that she wrote – the constant ‘applause’ makes the conference seem almost like a performance.
Offred’s authority over her own life story has been removed just as her freedom was in Gilead.
The shift in voice from Offred’s personal and subjective account to the Professors academic discourse may frustrate or even anger the reader.
The novel ends on a question which invites debate – having heard two perspectives on the story – the tone becomes didactic – a mark of dystopian fiction, as it moves from an imagined world to become a warning to us of a future to be avoided in real life.